Blank Hide and seek: Choi Minkyoo
《Blank Hide and Seek》 begins with a black structure. The black structure is a bare skeleton: it has no doors, windows, walls, or decorative elements, and its meaning or purpose is unknown. This structure is called the Blank. Around the Blank are fragments made from collected stories. Each fragment has its own form, content, and imagery. The act of making and installing these fragments is called Hide. The fragments placed around the Blank provide hints about how they might interact with the structure, suggesting its possible final form, spatial arrangement, size, background, or purpose.
The act of interpreting the fragments is Seek. Viewers begin to imagine the Blank’s form and meaning, bridging the gap between reality and virtual space using their own experiences and imagination. There is no single correct answer for the Blank. By repeatedly hiding and seeking with the fragments, each person reconstructs the space in their imagination. The interaction between the given clues and the empty structure allows the space to constantly transform in multiple ways.
Choi Minkyoo’s work stems from his childhood experience of moving to the Middle East with his father. The anxiety and alienation of adapting to a new environment, combined with the unfamiliar visual images of the places he lived and the people he met, inform the creation of his unique architectural structures that transcend time, space, and culture.
Through architectural elements, he explores the familiar and the strange, connection and disassembly, presenting new visual perspectives through the discovery of objects. The cold skeletons of bolts, steel, and mirrors are contrasted with the warmth of traditional korean colours and roof tiles, showing a dialogue between environment and human presence that points toward new directions. His interest in architecture is not about building houses, but about creating devices for visual illusion. A magical-realist space that evokes wonder.
Architecture is the product of the ideas and ideologies of each era. It is a visual medium capable of captivating others and maintains a close relationship with humans and society. My work begins with the sense of alienation felt in a new environment. As the environment changes, feelings of instability and differences in perception emerge. Over time, these experiences gradually seep into me, and my work shows that process
Unstable emotions are transformed into fully designed structures, while absorbed feelings become reconstructed images, forming newly composed spatial structures. Each component, initially designed on a two-dimensional plane, is assembled and constructed into a three-dimensional space. This process represents how I, as a subject, absorb, process, and internalize both the environment and the culture around me.
The act of disassembling and reconstructing buildings on a reduced scale evokes childhood toys. Children make sense of the vast, incomprehensible world through miniature models, which serve as a kind of pseudo-reality (different from reality but still resembling it), providing a pathway to understanding.
Choi Minkyoo recalls that during his childhood, frequently moving across the Middle East, he came to accept new environments only by taking apart Middle Eastern and Korean architectural models, mixing them, and reassembling them.
Similarly, his attempt to understand the world by navigating points of misunderstanding and inattention has evolved into his current practice: deconstructing real three-dimensional architecture, redesigning it on a two-dimensional plane, and then transforming it into spatial structures within his artistic universe. While this process may seem trivial, he hopes it can still offer comfort, like a child’s play, to those who encounter it.